This blog is posted from a now retired 33 year CAW (now UNIFOR) member. The purpose of this blog is to allow others to see the perspective of the average worker, rather than the views of the Union Leadership If you have any concerns or comments on this blog, contact me at Email:paulsblues45@hotmail.com
On Twitter: @PaulinAjax

Saturday, March 17, 2012

Globe & Mail Omits Significant Part Of Ian Brodie Comments...

and it's obvious why. I actually have to give Maher and McGregor credit. They ran a similar story as the Globe but had enough integrity to state all Brodie's thoughts in regards to the robocalls, something Lawrence Martin did not (que surprise?). This is the part the Globe omitted and M&M(tm?) included:

"Brodie said in an email to Martin that the culprit may not have needed to have access to CIMS, because so much information about voters is available from public sources, including Elections Canada, which lists donations.

"If you gave me an hour, I could cull a list of known Liberal and NDP supporters that added up to more than ten thousand names — using nothing but the Elections Canada website! And if I had a reasonably competent amateur programmer, I could match my list of known supporters to home telephone numbers in a single afternoon. Five cents per name and a few quotes from a few demon dial companies and there you go — a very large calling campaign."

In fact, the Globe included something that was completely opposite to what M&M included in their story. This s what the Globe wrote:

"Conservative partisans tried on Friday to tamp down the notion that the problem was bigger than Guelph, releasing records of calls made by an unknown operative who hid behind the alias Pierre Poutine. These records, provided to select journalists Friday, showed that thousands of calls were made to residents of Guelph, and that more than 140 stray calls were dialled to ridings outside the Southern Ontario city – likely in error.

Still, the records don’t explain why many voters outside of Guelph contend they received misleading calls directing them to wrong polling locations within their own communities.

That's also a complete 180 of what was also reported by M&M:

"Conservatives suggest that the pattern shows Poutine may have downloaded a list of Guelph opposition supporters that was clogged by bad data, which would explain why voters beyond the riding have complained of receiving the robodial directing them to the wrong polling station.

An industry expert, who spoke on condition of anonymity, agreed that may be what happened."It just means they didn't take the time to scroll through the list of phone numbers and delete them," he said."

It's called guilt by omisssion, something the G&M is guilty of here. It's also called crappy, unethical, partisan bullshit by people like me. And if you need any further proof:

"Something seems to have gone on, on a scale I've never seen before," Brodie wrote to Globe and Mail columnist Lawrence Martin, then joked: "As you may be aware, I am a strong proponent of the death penalty for this sort of thing."Martin, who didn't realize the comments were not for publication, posted them in a story on iPolitics.ca, which the political website later took down."

What's wrong with the entire quote? What's wrong with putting the statement in the context in which it was presented? Is that so hard to ask from LM? It's not like the G&M has a 500 word limit on this story after all do they?

CBC Terry Mildewski did the same thing on The national last night with Dean del Mastro...left out the beginning and the end of his comments on P&P and broadcasted a cut short 5 words to make him look like he was saying the Cons. did this. More crap reporting. Look at this statement by the NDP..interesting. Wonder what Frank Valeriote did to change things around after his "PANIC"? Furthermore...I read it was 200 votes...then I found an article where Iggy said it was 700 votes in the U of G ballot box. Which was it? Ballot stuffing too going on? Lots of questions but no answers.Check this statement out....

The election-day confusion worried the Guelph Liberal team. The Grits pleaded with the Greens and NDP to encourage their supporters to vote for Mr. Valeriote. In the end, he won by about 6,200 votes over the runner-up, Mr. Burke.

“The Liberals were running in a panic,” recalled Cameron Adams, who managed the Guelph NDP campaign. “[Mr. Valeriote] really thought that he could easily lose this election.”

The msm doesn't even seem to care about their low credibility any more. Have they not noticed that, with the internet, and bloggers and cross-checking, we can expose their many errors, in short order ?

What gets me is the hyperbole and certainty they regularly trot out--this robocal campaign is just too big and organized ... it MUST have been run by a large group of people, yadda yadda.

Yah right, whatever. Brodie blows a huge hole through that "argument". The msm takes us for a bunch of idiots.

This is some of what Dean said and CBC Mildewski said..."conservative said they made mistakes"....

Phone calls directing voters to the wrong polling stations in the last federal election could have been mistakes, and people should stop jumping to conclusions, Conservative MP Dean Del Mastro says.

Del Mastro, who has been leading his party’s defence in the controversy over live and automated election phone calls, said nobody has come forward to say they didn’t vote because they first went to the wrong polling station.

“So where are these people? Where are these people? Where are these people saying that I got the call, I went to the wrong station, and then I didn’t vote?” Del Mastro said on CBC’s Power & Politics.

“There haven’t been any. No one has stepped forward and said that.”

“Some of these things, as I’ve already indicated, could have well been mistakes. I don’t understand why folks jump to these things and run to a conclusion that they have no evidence of.”Ontario Girl

The ironic part is if you ever used CIMS it is highly inaccurate. This is just listing my experience contacting Tory supporters who you may or may not have kept some reasonable contact with. Imagine how poor it is for those who hate the Tories. I imagine the elections canada list would be much more accurate.

As a programmer I can tell you it would be easy to do what Ian Brodie says. In fact he just gave me a great idea. Next election watch out for some funny business from a certain Paulette Poutine! It will a call from the coalition telling everybody that the election has been cancelled.

The Media Party "war" against the Government Canadians chose proves the theory that the first casualty of "war" is the truth... The media are as corrupt to the core as the Liberal lefty's they shill for.

Good grief, you should be really careful when citing partisan sources on just about anything. I have spent many years in politics, and have done exactly what Brodie is implying MAY have happened in mining publicly available data. What he is doing is creating plausible deniability. The actual way to get lists of known supporters of other party`s is to download a CSV file of donors over $20 from the elections canada finacial contributors database. They can then be searched, collated etc. Those lists will provide at the most a few hundred names per electoral district. No phone numbers, no addresses, no actionable data. Even the names are often mis-spelt, or weirdly formatted. The EC lists do not have phone numbers, you have to purchase phone numbers, or go through a laborious process of downloading from canada411 or the like, and matching names and addresses. Yes, you could assemble some kind of list from the sources Brodie describes, NO you could not assemble an actionable list sorted on any useful basis, with phone numbers included. Anyway, EC has both CIMS and the call lists for at least one robo-dialling campaign. This lame apologia by Brodie will be tossed out shortly as facts supercede the messaging and damage control. Based upon probabilities, and just how damned difficult it would be to assemble this data without access to CIMS, 1 will predict that A) The call list(s) used originated in CIMS andB: You will stop claiming it is all a fabrication, and start claiming that it was an honest mistake.

"B: You will stop claiming it is all a fabrication, and start claiming that it was an honest mistake"

Are you not the one who argued with me that the 31,000 number were actual complaints? That's down to 700, and will be greatly whittled down again once nuisance calls, which some complained to as misleading will also be thrown on the trash heap. Actually you can make it 698, as one complaint is from me in regards to the call I received, and another is from me regarding a claim made by someone else about receiving a robocall, when in fact they weren't even in the province.

I've already alluded to the fact that the CIMS list may have been used in previous posts. It's also a probability the names and numbers came from a list of Liberal supporters used in the Guelph campaign.

@paul, you are incorrect. I did not argue with you about 31,000 complaints, you argued with yourself about it. I said I did not care whether there were tens of thousands or thousands, or hundreds. The number is not relevant once you get above a few incidences you are into a serious offense.And whether or not the calls spread beyond Guelph is no longer in dispute, they did.

And I would suggest that you ban anonymous commentators from your blog. Just saying, if you do not mopderate, and you allow truthiness (laughed my ass off when I first heard that word, truthiness), in the comments then you will eventually get sued.